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I am currently in Dublin, Ireland for four days! I am very excited and hoping it won’t be too cold. Traveling presents a great opportunity for me to do some reading that I wouldn’t normally get to do. Before school ended, my class and I discussed out plans for vacation reading and I explained that I would be reading on the plane. I usually reserve my adult book for plane rides, and I have two long ones for this trip! We fly non-stop from NJ to Dublin, but on the way home we fly from Dublin to O’Hare, and then home to Newark. (So cross your fingers- the forecast looks good so far- but no snowstorms on the 27th and nothing from NJ to Chicago on the 1st!)

Here are the books I am bringing in my carry-on:Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell: This is one I have been dying to read for a few weeks now. From the Amazon.com review, “alcolm Gladwell poses a more provocative question in Outliers: why do some people succeed, living remarkably productive and impactful lives, while so many more never reach their potential? Challenging our cherished belief of the “self-made man,” he makes the democratic assertion that superstars don’t arise out of nowhere, propelled by genius and talent: “they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.” Examining the lives of outliers from Mozart to Bill Gates, he builds a convincing case for how successful people rise on a tide of advantages, “some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky.”

College Girl by Patricia Weitz: Megan McCafferty recommended this on her blog and she blurbed it, so I just had to read it! And my local bookstore had it on the shelves a few days early, so I grabbed it. It was technically released on the 26th, but I picked it up on Christmas Eve.As Simple as Snow by Gregory Galloway: This one has been on my shelf for a few months now and I just never got to it. Now seemed like the perfect time.

A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly: A Printz winner, this has been on my bookshelf for a few months, too. It sounds great and I can’t wait to read it!

Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin: I took four years of Latin and this is based on Virgil’s Aeneid. How can I not read it?

Hopefully, this will be enough books to tide me over. A six hour plane ride there and 8.5 hours back. Plus a 5 hour layover in Chicago. I am planning to sleep a good bit on the plane, but I have to have enough reading material, too! It’s a hard decision, because I can’t bring really heavy books but I also have to make sure I bring thick books, because more pages means more reading!

I got the same requests to add some info to Book Blogs. Do you think I should make a group about bookish charities, mention it in the discussion, or leave these kinds of things out of the site altogether? What do you think?